The Winters(9)
His face softened. “Seems we have something in common, both of us orphans.”
“But you have your daughter.”
He smiled. “Yes. Dani. She’s full of life, that one. I try, but she’s a complicated little thing. Very brave. Or maybe just reckless.” He focused his camera on two seabirds climbing and diving into the surf.
“She’s a teenager,” I said. “Aren’t they supposed to be reckless?”
He dropped his camera and turned to look at me squarely. “You don’t seem the type that has ever been reckless, with anything or anyone.”
Despite the essential truth of his observation, it was one of those compliments, again, that I puzzled over. Did he mean discerning and mature, or dull and stable? To counter the possibility of the latter interpretation, I replied, too quickly, “Well, I wish I could be reckless sometimes, do whatever I want, say whatever I’m thinking, go anywhere I please, with anyone I want, and never come back here if I don’t want to. To be honest with you, recklessness is a luxury to someone like me.”
“Please don’t say that.” He said it as though he’d asked this of me before, to no avail. “I like you just like this. Dependable. Hands on the wheel. Keeping everything afloat, so to speak.”
To punctuate this plea he snapped a picture of me before I had a chance to protest, or even pose in some flattering way, which I found mildly alarming.
“You’re looking at me like I stole your spirit. I shouldn’t have done that without asking.”
I stepped forward and placed my hand on his camera. “It’s okay. I’d like to see it.”
He flipped back to the shot. I veiled the tiny screen and we crowded in to look. Lit from behind, my hair a whirl of dark waves caught in the wind, I barely recognized myself. It was an arresting photo; I couldn’t hide my pleasure.
If anyone were to have passed us that day on the boat, what would they have seen? A regular couple enjoying a bounty of good decisions they’d made in life, to be together, to afford to come here, to take out a boat, to pack good food to eat on a cloudless day? Up close would they have noticed my nervousness? How I hoped my driving seemed fluid and expert. How every time my eyes darted around to find Max they seemed to catch him looking at me. Or perhaps they would have thought this is the father and that is the daughter, and she’s manning the boat on her own for the first time, and his smile indicates more a paternal pride than an older man wooing a young woman.
His phone rang. Turned out he did have work to do that day, banking, the kind I imagined was usually conducted in windowless rooms, at long tables surrounded by men in suits. Yet there he was, leaning casually on the handrail, legs crossed, squinting at me while he openly discussed his business, using terminology that had little to do with money but everything to do with wealth, which, my father taught me, were two very different things. One bought you shoes, he said, the other power; one attention, the other secrecy, which was the most important commodity of all, because that’s how rich people stayed that way.
His mood was lighter after getting a bit of business out of the way and he began, unbidden by me, to finally talk about his life; his daughter; his sister, Louisa, with whom he was close (“We bicker like old married people, but we’re partners in crime”). He even cued up a recent photo he’d taken of Asherley in the distance, probably the only vantage point from which one could take in the entirety of the house. The photo was recent, from a few weeks ago, so the grounds were covered in snow.
“It’s called Queen Anne, this style of architecture. Quite different than the classic center-hall designs you see up and down the Gold Coast.”
I nodded as though I had any clue what constituted Queen Anne architecture or where one might find the Gold Coast. To me Asherley simply looked like a remote winter palace, its turrets topped with a dozen red snow-capped spires, its windows deep-set like old eyes.
“It’s very beautiful. How old is it?”
“The house itself is around two hundred years old. My great-great-grandfather Ashton Winter built it for his bride, Beverley Daneluk. Of the Massachusetts Daneluks,” he added jauntily, as if to emphasize the hoity-toityness of the match. “That’s where Dani’s name comes from.”
Max explained how the house took years to build, the labor mostly provided by bound boys, indentured servants who lived and worked the land to pay off family debt.
“Ha, like me with Laureen,” I said, only half kidding. I prodded him for more. He confirmed what Laureen had said, how Charles I had granted the island to his family. For three of the four hundred years they’d lived there, the Winters were farmers, until his grandfather and father worked on Wall Street and he eventually went into politics.
“A lot of the original structures are scattered here and there. Stone ruins from the first house, foundations from a barn built in the 1700s, parts of the bound boys’ quarters. People come and tour the island every once in a while, conservationists and the like,” he said. “And except for some updates, the house had been pretty much untouched until Rebekah decided to make renovating Asherley her life’s work.”
It was the first time he’d spoken his late wife’s name. Did I imagine his shoulders sinking a bit, sadness creeping in around his features? Or was that happening to me? I tried to change the subject to something benign, asking him why he’d gone into politics, but she lingered there, too.